All a Blur

The combination of the well meaning and none too bright in an ‘expert’ role is a dangerous thing

The year is 1999, for many years I had developed and printed my self portraits and images of my wife, and us together. Yes, naked people. I used to scan the prints I made in my own black and white darkroom and place them on a small website that I had on the internet.

Our children were about 7 at the time. In previous years when they were rather younger, when on holiday, we used to visit naturist beaches.

Someone in a ‘professional role’ heard about all this and without actually looking to see what was on the internet suggested to Social Services that we should be investigated, spinning a story that started with some truths but then developed through the lack of actually listening through the making of worst case assumptions into a damning set of untruths.

Social Services then, as required, neglected to contact the family’s doctors to see if there might be any issues. Doctors who coincidentally were in charge of child protection in two London districts. They also neglected to apply the requirement to contact the school - they would have discovered that my daughter had just been selected by her school to go into Westminster to meet Tony Blair as part of the UN initiative on the rights of the child.

Without even looking at the website to see what was actually there Social Services went ahead and contacted the police. Again, without looking at the website to see what was actually there (apparently they had no choice once instructed by Social Services) the police raided our home, searched it, looked through all our most personal photographs and took away two computers.

This photo were taken a few days later. I title it “Life in a mess”.

Three months later we had the computers back and received financial compensation from the individual who misled  Social Services. We received an abject apology from Social Services who did not know what hit them when they sent a junior underling out to see us on a review of the case.

We did not pursue the police because throughout they were civil and were acting on false information. In fact the police actually complemented me on the quality of the images - most of  what they would see in carrying out their roles would be the worst child porn imaginable so it was actually a refreshing experience to deal with us.

I will always remember the fury of my doctor (remember he was responsible for child protection in the area) on the day he found out that he had been told nothing of this. That was the day when I was unburdened.

But it took a couple of years before I felt free again to produce more of the photos that you see here now.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License Although I’ve always permitted resharing within the tumblr community, I thought I’d let you know :)